1969 AMX Super Stock - Cave Dweller

Unchanged from its glory days of racing, this hot piece of American muscle is very special. Originality was the primary reason Larry Weymouth wanted to add this Hurst AMX Super Stock to his collection of great American muscle car iron.

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“I knew they had this car,” he told us at The Forge Muscle Car Classic in Pigeon Forge, Tennessee, referring to the father-and-son duo Bill and Brian Rodekopf.

Bill Rodekopf, now 89 years old and as sharp as a tack, still owns the beloved ’51 Packard Patrician 400 he bought new from his former Packard dealership. Bill was also a Nash dealer in those early ’50s days. When Nash merged with Hudson to form American Motors, he became an AMC dealer.

Luckily for Brian Rodekopf, his father was a car guy and into racing. In 1968, the dealership sponsored a 390 Javelin on the dragstrip, driven by Bob “Tree” Smith, a local insurance adjustor nicknamed for his proficiency at the starting line.

When AMC announced its ’69 AMX SS, Bill Rodekopf wrote a check for $5,011.08, dealer cost, for a purpose-built drag car engineered to compete in Super Stock. The window sticker was $5,994, huge money then for a new car.

Brian was hanging out at the dealership on an April day in 1969 when an AMC transport truck rolled into town with the AMX aboard. The arrival of a raucous Super Stock drag car transformed an otherwise sedate, Norman Rockwell–like setting at Bill Rodekopf Motors in Independence, Missouri, into high excitement.

3/8The 390 looked loaded for bear with the pair of Holleys on the Edelbrock aluminum cross-ram intake manifold. Brian Rodekopf says the carburetors flowed 585 cfm, not 650 as AMC advertised in its literature.

Once the car rolled off the transporter, Bob Smith went to work. “By the end of the week he had the cam changed and the tires and wheels swapped out,” Brian told us. “On Saturday night he raced the car at Kansas City International Raceway. On his first pass off the trailer that car went 11 flat at 128 mph.”

SS Equipment

How different from a regular AMX was an AMX SS? AMX SS equipment entailed more than 20 performance enhancements. Henry’s Machine Works in Bellflower, California, supplied one-piece racing axles to withstand the tremendous torque loads of a drag car. Hurst modified the suspension, but the changes were “very minimal,” said Brian. He credits Landruth Corporation with design work on leaf springs, manufactured by Rockwell International and “built along the lines of the fabled Chrysler Super Stock leaf springs.”

With six-cylinder front coils (what AMC called “Special Super Stock Springs”), the front end would rise farther on launch, just what a drag car needed for weight transfer.

Brian said, “The big deal was the motor. It had a stock stroke but 12.3:1-compression JE pistons and heads modified in conjunction with Crane,” including porting, polishing, and “valve changes.”

4/8Super Stock drag racing adhered to strict rules of a “stock” nature, meaning functioning lights and windshield wipers, to make the car, ostensibly, street legal. The irony is the SS AMX was not intended for street use, as indicated on the original window sticker.

An Edelbrock aluminum cross-ram intake manifold mounted a pair of Holley 650-cfm four-barrels with what the factory called “un-silenced” air cleaners. Spark came from a Mallory distributor, coil, and wires.

Oddly, the cam was bone stock. “The cars left the assembly plant in Kenosha with the same camshaft and lifters an Ambassador station wagon would have had,” said Brian. He feels AMC did not ask Hurst for a cam swap because every racer had a favorite manufacturer. Bob Smith, for example, favored Sig Erson cams.

Brian said, “He had umpteen different Sig cams he had tried in the course of 1968 and several profiles he knew worked well [in the 390]. He had already ordered a brand new cam and had it ready to go when the car arrived.”

With the stock hydraulic cam the factory rated the 390 at 340 hp, or just 25 more than the 390 in a regular AMX. Brian recalls how the NHRA refactored the horsepower in the spring and early summer of 1969 to 375, pushing the SS AMX from the SS/E class to SS/D. Shortly thereafter, NHRA refactored the power again to 405 and moved the car into SS/C.

Among the Elite

Bob Smith knew how to make a 390 run on the dragstrip. There were about a half-dozen AMX Super Stocks that were really fast back then, Brian said. The most famous was H.L. and Shirley Shahan’s Drag-On Lady. Then there was Peterson Motor Company in Kearney, Nebraska, with another fast AMX SS named Pete’s Patriot.

5/8Bob “Tree” Smith bent steel tubing around a basketball backboard to form the rollcage.

Brian places his dad’s SS in the elite group of top AMXs. Bill Rodekopf sponsored Bob Smith locally and elsewhere in the Midwest. AMC donated go-fast parts.

Brian said, “KCIR [Kansas City International Raceway] was primarily where Dad liked to run the car for the most exposure for the dealership.” Smith won AHRA and NHRA events, including various SS and Eliminator class victories.

Brian began driving the AMX in 1971 and ran the car nonstop “clear through the end of the ’77 season.” Clark Rand also drove an AMX SS, and they became good friends.

At the start of the ’78 season, Brian partnered with Clark to run a Hornet AMX in Pro Stock. Clark sold his AMX, but Brian stored his car. Incredibly, his AMX sat untouched and out of the daylight (in a limestone cave) for the next 16 years.

6/8The paintjob on the car is the same one from fall 1969, done by John Fensom, who went by the trade name of OOP. He painted Funny Cars at Dick Harrell’s Performance Center in Kansas City. “Soul Paint by OOP” was his signature. After Harrell died, Fensom came to work at Rodekopf’s dealership doing custom body and paint work. The AMX SS body was stock from Hurst in ’69, with no wheelwell work to fit large slicks.

When Clark moved away, Brian bought out his partner, but after a few years racing on his own and with a traveling sales job, he could not devote the time he needed to the sport. He did not want to go back to Super Stock or a bracket class with the AMX, so he finally stepped away from racing.

Super Shifters

In 1993, while making a sales call around the Lake of the Ozarks, Brian heard about the Ozark Mountain Super Shifters. The rules were simple. The car had to be clutch-launched and manually shifted, and have no electronics, delay boxes, or power-adders. The AMX, pretty much unchanged since the early ’70s, fit perfectly.

Enthused, Brian dragged the AMX SS home. He installed a battery, changed plugs, cranked the motor, ran a compression test, rebuilt the Holleys, poured in some Sunoco racing gas, and turned on the fuel pump, and the 390 fired up. He loaded the AMX on the trailer and drove to St. Louis for the race. First pass was a 10.89 at 123 mph, pretty much the same e.t. he’d been running when he parked the car in 1977. He ended up eliminating all the other competitors.

After running one or two more Super Shifters events the following year, Brian retired the car again. In 2005 he accepted an invitation to park his AMX in the Kenosha History Museum in Kenosha, Wisconsin. He regrets not taking the car to the 2007 NHRA Hot Rod Reunion in Bowling Green, Kentucky, where, 30 years before he had won a Wally award with this car.

In 2008 and 2009, Brian showed his AMX locally, including a muscle car reunion and nostalgic drag race at KCIR. His big finale with the car came in a 2009 exhibition run against the Red Alert ’70 Chevelle LS6.

7/8Here’s the original invoice. Note the list of Hurst’s conversion parts, as well as the warning at the bottom of the invoice.

At that point Brian figured he had had all the fun he could with this car over the course of 40-some years. The lines crossed between the car’s sentimental and monetary value. Larry Weymouth seemed to Brian like the collector who would maintain and preserve the AMX. The deal went down in 2011.

That August, Larry transported his AMX SS to the Woodward Dream Cruise. According to the original window sticker, the SS is “not intended for highway or general passenger car use.” But Larry had other ideas.

“I have another ’69 AMX, a street one,” he said. “I took the [license] plate off that and put it on the SS and drove it to the Dream Cruise. My friend has an AMX Super Stock as well. We took both of them. Let me tell you, we had a hell of a crowd around us all day. His is restored, and mine is not. You should have seen the crowd that came when we said we were going to leave. It was unbelievable.

“I got on it a few times,” Larry told us. “What I didn’t know at that time, though, is that the brakes were pretty nonfunctional. The first time I got on it I had a lot of speed and I realized the brakes were pretty bad. After that I didn’t get on it too hard unless I had a lot of room.”

8/8Current owner Larry Weymouth with some of the Rodekopf team gear he got with the AMX SS. These pieces are as well preserved as the car.

Maybe Larry will race the car for nostalgia sake in the future. How great would it be to watch either Bob “Tree” Smith or Brian Rodekopf on the dragstrip, just like in the glory days?